When Nick Lowe toured America to promote Quality Street, his 2013 album of Christmas songs, his backing band was Yep Roc labelmates Los Straitjackets, retro rockers whose own albums suggested they hadn’t heard any new music since about 1965, their records awash with twanging instrumental rock’n’roll, rockabilly, surf music, teen ballads, some Tex-Mex and country. Nick, meanwhile, had been reversing into tomorrow, to borrow an old Stiff sales slogan, for most of his career, plausibly even earlier. They were a perfect musical match. And what a spectacle they offered! Four burly Americans in black hitman suits festooned with gold Aztec medallions, each sporting a lurid Mexican wrestling mask. The dapper Nick out front in crisp white shirt and black slacks, relaxed as a Rat Pack crooner at a poolside matinee.
Over the decade Nick’s been touring with Los Straitjackets, there have been occasional forays into the studio, tracks recorded on the hoof, wherever they happened to be, released as singles and EPs. Nine of the 12 songs on Indoor Safari are taken from those sessions, the original tracks either remixed or re-recorded with Los Straitjackets. There are three previously unreleased songs, two originals and a cover. Which makes Indoor Safari in the disappointed opinion of some fans less a new Nick album, his first in over a decade, than a compilation – you could hardly call it a ‘greatest hits’ set. It’s a fair point, but eventually irrelevant. Whatever the provenance of these songs, Indoor Safari is marvellous, by any reasonable critical metric a glorious confection.
The album opens with “Went To A Party”, a new song, if that isn’t an odd way to describe a track that makes you think of the flickering black and white ghosts of American teenagers jiving on American Bandstand to a group of surly teenagers straight out of the garage who go on to become The Kingsmen or someone like them. Elsewhere, you might listen to swashbuckling rockabilly rave-up “Tokyo Bay”, outright rocker “Love Starvation” or the wry, sultry country soul of “Don’t Be Nice To Me” and think Indoor Safari maybe returns Nick to the kind of songwriting – hip, humorous, full of hooks – that preceded the so-called Brentford Trilogy, the three albums of confessional introspection that reintroduced Nick as a mature country crooner. There’s certainly a relaxed groove to a lot of these tunes, but their nonchalance shouldn’t be mistaken for flippancy. There are moments here as heart-stricken as anything on The Impossible Bird, Dig My Mood or The Convincer.
Nick in some of these songs is often lonely, even in a crowd; haunted by lost loves, lost time. Listening to, say, “Blue On Blue” or “Different Kind Of Blue” (a new song based on a Convincer demo) you imagine Nick like someone in a Sinatra song, something from In The Wee Small Hours, walking deserted pre-dawn streets, the last bars closing, stopping under a streetlamp, hat tilted back on his head, tie loose, smoking a cigarette in the sodium glow. Possibly whistling. “Trombone”, meanwhile, is the saddest song ever written about a valve instrument.
Like the deceptively chipper “Crying Inside”, they’re evocative of a time when confronted by any adversity – love, war, a bad day at the office – you were meant to put on what used to be called a “brave face”. They hark back therefore to a certain kind of songwriting when stoicism and discretion prevailed. This was before a generation of early-’70s singer-songwriters flooded the market with confession and ostentatious soul-baring. It’s appropriate then that so much of the music here similarly has a period quality, evocative of a time not so much of innocence as reticence. “Jet Pac Boomerang”, another new song, is a classic example of Nick’s abiding affection for pre-Beatles pop, the kind The Beatles and the groups that followed them erased and replaced. The song ends with a quote from “Please Please Me” that works poignantly as a link between a vanishing musical era and what came next.
There are two covers. “A Quiet Place” is a lustrous, soulful take on a 1964 track by Garnett Mimms & The Enchanters, suggested by Nick’s son, Roy. “Raincoat In The River”, recorded by Nick in 2019, was popularised by a breezy Ricky Nelson. Nick leans more into the 1961 version by R&B singer Sammy Turner, produced by Phil Spector, tackling the song with real panache over a wall of Los Straitjackets twang. What a treasure he is.
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